Sermons

“Lord, When Did We See You?”

Mathew 4:1-11; Matthew 25:31-46 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – February 2, 2015

  Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might open our hearts to the presence of your Christ with us in our most difficult moments and share that compassion with all your children. We pray it in the name of Jesus, Amen.   So welcome to Lent! It’s actually been Lent since Wednesday, when some 30-odd of us gathered here to take on the sign of the ashes and pray. But for the sake of clarity, let’s back up a bit and make sure we all understand what this season is that we’re entering into. The word “Lent” actually comes from the same roots as “lengthen,” making reference to the fact that the days are getting longer. But as a liturgical season, it doesn’t really have much to do with moving from winter to spring. Lent is 40 days long, if you don’t count the Sundays, which is kind of a funny way to count, since Sundays are when we most notice that it is Lent because that’s when we’re in church. But then, the Church has frequently taken a funny approach to counting. The truth is that 40 is a pretty important number in the Bible, so I guess they went with whatever made that work. We heard in that scripture from Matthew 4 why these 40 have such symbolic power. Just as his ministry was starting, immediately following his baptism by John in the Jordan River, Jesus was prodded by the Holy Spirit to go out into the wilderness, where he fasted and prayed for 40 days. Those 40 days, of course, also reflect the 40 years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness between Egypt and the Promised Land. Apparently 40 is a soul-transforming number. So if those 40 days in the wilderness are the determining influence on this season of Lent, let’s think about them for a minute. One might say that the defining characteristic of wilderness is that there aren’t other people around. You go there to get away from people, right? Jesus, in particular, was presumably going away to commune with God his Father. He was going to spend his time in prayer, in conversation with God. You could even argue that he was going to let go of his own humanness as much as possible, as evidenced by his fasting. But what if it’s exactly the opposite? What if Jesus was in the desert alone and hungry precisely to connect with his humanity? It seems like his human weakness was likely to be in his face every moment of every last one of those 40 days. Hunger is hard to ignore. Thirst is dangerously painful. The heat of the days and the cold of the nights was not going unnoticed. What if Jesus was not there to summon all the holy omnipotence he could for the ministry ahead of him, but instead to become excruciatingly aware of his human limitations? What if the point of Lent is not confessing our sins pathetically because we’re not all-powerful like God, but that we confess our sins gratefully because God became human like us, in Jesus who was famished, and tired and thirsty and weak? Perhaps this story of Jesus in the wilderness is not about Jesus’ super-human capacity to use his knowledge of scripture to withstand temptation, even when he’s weakened by hunger and thirst. Maybe it’s about Jesus embracing his human weakness, in solidarity with us, showing that even he cannot withstand the pressures of human life without the support of God’s love and mercy. There is something about connecting through weakness. This may sound paradoxical, but I would venture to say that connecting through weakness is one of the strongest ways to make a connection. You meet a new person, and you like one another well enough as acquaintances. But then one of you risks revealing something personal and painful, or one of you goes through something scary and difficult, and the bond of your friendship is stronger for it. The solidarity of that, the empathy you share is often where the love of God becomes most tangible for us humans. I think this is partially what is going on with Jesus’ teaching from Matthew 25. This passage is going to be our theme scripture for these six weeks of Lent. Each week, we will explore one or two of the states of weakness that Jesus mentioned, and think about what it means to see Jesus there. You’ll hear not just from me, but also from Tim Tiffany and Sadie Cullumber as we move through the season toward Easter. And if you want a more enriching experience of it, I encourage you to join us for Bible Study each Wednesday, where we’ll be diving even deeper into the scriptures and issues that will be presented the next Sunday. In telling us that we will find him in serving those in need, Jesus is pushing us into the life-changing intimacy created when we face weakness head on. When I take your weakness and claim it as my own, your pain becomes my pain, and we carry it together. This is what happens when we feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and importantly, it’s also what happened when God took on human form and lived among us, susceptible to hunger and pain and cold and grief. One of the dangers of the Matthew 25 passage is the psychological distance we may assume between us and the “least of these”. We are clearly either the sheep or the goats, depending on the moment, right? Does it ever occur to us that we might also be the hungry stranger? Or the naked prisoner? Or the thirsty clinic patient? There is no use in approaching this passage with an “us-them” mentality. We are the sheep. We are the goats. We are the hungry, thirsty, unknown, naked, sick prisoners. And Jesus meets us in our weakness and rejoices in our generous hospitality. If the season of Lent is about preparing our hearts to welcome the Risen Christ, we might begin by realizing that unless we first embrace Jesus’ humanity, that Easter miracle won’t mean a whole lot. And so as we embark on this season of preparation, we set out in search of the Jesus present in human weakness. How will we find him? How can we serve him? One of the best ways we as Disciples have of serving Jesus where he is found in human weakness is through Week of Compassion, our denominational disaster relief and humanitarian development fund that we celebrate and give to today. We heard a lot last week about all the ways that Week of Compassion reaches out to people in desperate situations. Whether it’s that first solidarity grant to let disaster victims know they’re not alone, or being the ones who stick around long after the tragedy has dropped from the headlines, or doing the quiet, long-term work of helping children overcome the effects of growing up in a war zone, or building wells that transform communities, Week of Compassion is serving Jesus by serving the least of these all around the world, all throughout the year. Today, rather than dwelling on the stories, we are going to celebrate the depth of love shared through Week of Compassion by experiencing the holy solidarity of it through communion. When we come to the Lord’s Table today, it will be for “element-less” communion. And I want everyone to understand why we do this, so I’m going to tell you the story of how it got started. Many of you will remember that back in the middle of January 2010, there was a massive earthquake in Haiti. The infrastructure was poor enough that the earthquake was absolutely devastating. I knew that Week of Compassion would be there, working with our mission partners who were already present, but I also knew that those sorts of things take time, and the people going through it were having to endure every moment. As I was sitting in church that Sunday, just a few days after the earthquake, during communion in my fancy chair up front, I started wondering what was happening that morning in Haiti. Were they even trying to have church? If they were, would they attempt to share in communion? Would they have anything to use for communion? Could you have communion, if you didn’t have bread and juice or wine or even clean water? And it got me thinking, what is it that makes communion communion? Is it the bread? Is what’s in the cup? Or could you, in fact, have communion with absolutely nothing at all because what really matters is the presence of the living Christ, which was most definitely available in Haiti that morning? I knew Christ was there with them, just as he was present at our fully laden table. Would they also know and experience this, despite perhaps having nothing with which to celebrate the Lord’s Supper? And so I determined that once a year, when it came time to remember all those who are served by our gifts to Week of Compassion, we should put ourselves in their place, if only in the most symbolic of ways. So when you come forward for communion this morning, you will be offered the plate and the cup, but they will be empty of visible nourishment. What you will receive, instead is the invisible nourishment of the presence of the Living Christ, who meets us in our places of deepest need. As you receive this holiest of meals, you are invited to seek to see Christ in the hungry and thirsty, in the stranger and the naked, in the sick and the prisoners. You are invited to rejoice in the fact that we also are weak and in need, and Jesus is with us in those trials. After you have received that invisible meal, you are invited to come up to the chancel to view our display, which will be developing throughout the season. There are small slips of paper with different blessings on them. These blessings are inspired by the states of need Jesus listed in Matthew 25. If there is one that answers your need, you are invited to take it with you. You can take as many as you need. It is Christ’s table. We are all invited to come, with whatever brokenness we are carrying. Let us come, giving thanks that Jesus came to be with us in our human weakness. Let us come, giving thanks that we are empowered by God to serve others in their weakness and thus find Christ in our midst. Let us come, giving thanks that we are not alone and unnourished on this journey. Let us come, giving thanks. Amen.